A love story. Despite the whips, the humiliations, the latex and the bullets.

Severe is the author's fictionalised take on a sensational and tragic event: the murder of a rich banker by his lover, as recounted by her. Régis Jauffret makes the narrator's story entirely credible: every sentence carries her tortuous personality, and she gives a loving and far from conventional picture of the banker. A performance all the more remarkable as he might appear as the archetypical debauched millionaire. But Régis Jauffret does not moralise and he acknowledges no sins. He knows that love stories are private planets where the only valid laws are those that allow them to last.